The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear Godin Evangelical Christianity

T. M. Luhrmann, Howard Nusbaum, and Ronald Thisted

ABSTRACT In this article, we use a combination of ethnographic data and empirical methods to identify a process

called “absorption,” which may be involved in contemporary Christian evangelical prayer practice (and in the practices

of other religions). The ethnographer worked with an interdisciplinary team to identify people with a proclivity for

“absorption.” Those who seemed to have this proclivity were more likely to report sharper mental images, greater

focus, and more unusual spiritual experience. The more they prayed, the more likely they were to have these

experiences and to embrace fully the local representation of God. Our results emphasize learning, a social process

to which individuals respond in variable ways, and they suggest that interpretation, proclivity, and practice are all

important in understanding religious experience. This approach builds on but differs from the approach to religion

within the culture-and-cognition school.

Keywords: proclivity, absorption, Christianity, anthropology of religion, prayer

How does God become real to people when God isunderstood to be invisible and immaterial, as God is

within the Christian tradition? This is not the question ofwhether God is real but, rather, how people learn to makethe judgment that God is present. Such a God is not accessibleto the senses. When one talks to that God, one can neithersee his face nor hear his voice. One cannot touch him. Howcan one be confident that he is there?

Many people comfortably assume that training and tal-ent are important in many areas of life: ballet, violin play-ing, and tennis—any of the arts or sports. It seems moreawkward to talk about talent and training when it comesto experiencing God, at least in Judaism and Christianity.Those who are religious might find it awkward because totalk of either talent or training seems to suggest that humancharacteristics, not God, explain the voice they heard orthe vision they saw. In the Hebrew Bible, those who hearGod sometimes stress their reluctance to be chosen for theirprophetic role. Their flat refusal to think of themselves assuitable adds to the reader’s faith in their authenticity. “Thenthe word of the Lord came unto me,” says Jeremiah, “saying,before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and beforethou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I or-dained thee a prophet unto the nations.Then said I, Ah, LordGOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child” (Jeremiah1:4–6).

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 112, Issue 1, pp. 66–78, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. c!2010 by the American Anthropological Associ-

ation. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01197.x

And yet it may be the case that hearing God speak andhaving other vivid, unusual spiritual experiences that seemlike unambiguous evidence of divine presence might be, insome respects, like becoming a skilled athlete. In this article,we argue that something like talent and training are involvedin the emergence of certain kinds of religious experiences. Inparticular, we argue that people who enjoy being absorbedin internal imaginative worlds are more likely to respondto the trained practice of certain kinds of prayer and morelikely to have unusual spiritual experiences of the divine. Weargue that there is a capacity for absorption and that thosewho have a talent for it and who train to develop it are morelikely to have powerful sensory experiences of the presenceof God.

The larger project here is to emphasize the role of skilledlearning in the experience of God. A new and exciting bodyof anthropological work argues that beliefs in invisible inten-tional beings are so widespread because they are a byproductof intuitive human reasoning. This is the kind of reasoningthat Daniel Kahneman (2003) describes in his Nobel speechas “system one”: quick, effortless, and implicit. These an-thropologists argue that the biases in these intuitions evolvedto enable us to survive. We see faces in the clouds, as StewartGuthrie (1995) puts it, because it was adaptive for our an-cestors to interpret ambiguous sounds as potential threats.If you assume that a rustling bush hides a crouching leopard,

Luhrmann et al. • Absorption Hypothesis 67

most of the time you make a foolish mistake—but occasion-ally, that interpretation will save your life.

Justin Barrett (2004) attributes human anthropomor-phism to an “agent-detection” system, a sophisticated devel-opment of a modular model of mind (Fodor 1983; Sperber1996). Pascal Boyer describes the mind as comprised of“specialized explanatory devices, more properly called ‘in-ference systems,’ each of which is adapted to particular kindsof events and automatically suggests explanations for theseevents” (2001:17). From this perspective, religion emergesbecause, as meaning-making creatures, humans spin websof significance around intuitive inferences in a form thatcan be remembered and transmitted (Atran 2002, 2007;Whitehouse 2004). This school of thought leads us to payattention to how easy it is for people to believe in God be-cause those beliefs arise out of an evolved adaptation to theworld. These scholars capture an important aspect of thecomplex phenomenon of religious belief.

And yet it is also hard for many people to believe in Godwhen they are thoughtful, reflective, and deliberative (thekind of reasoning Kahneman described as “system two”).This difficulty is particularly evident for those in an arguablysecular society (Asad 2003; Taylor 2007), where there aremany alternatives to religious commitment, but E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1956) describes even the Nuer as struggling toarrive at what they felt to be the correct understandingof divinity. One sees this difficulty of making sense of thesupernatural in Augustine’s Confessions (1963), as he agonizesover how to interpret the true nature of God. One seesit among U.S. evangelical Christians who often believe insome abstract, absolute sense that God exists but struggleto experience God as real in the everyday world aroundthem. For many who believe intuitively that the supernaturalexists, it takes effort to accept that a particular interpretationof the supernatural is correct, and it takes effort to livein accordance with that interpretation—to live as if theyreally do believe that their understanding is accurate. Itrequires learning, and the learning can be a slow process,like learning to speak a foreign language in an unfamiliarcountry, with new and different social cues. That learning isoften stumbling and gradual for those who convert, take onnew roles, or go through an initiation process. People mustcome to see differently, to think differently, and above allto feel differently, because to believe in a particular form ofthe supernatural as if the supernatural is truly present is, formost believers, to experience the world differently than ifthat form of the supernatural were not real.

In this article, we contribute to an approach to reli-gion that is focused on skilled learning. Learning as such—learning explicitly named and studied—was once relegatedto side corners of anthropology, addressed through child-hood socialization (Kulick 1992; Schieffelin 1990) or ap-prenticeship (Herzfeld 2003). Yet, within the anthropologyof religion, there is emerging a set of scholars who addresslearning directly and who see learning as at the heart of theprocess of having faith. Saba Mahmood (2005) argues that

her female subjects neither follow Islamic commands blindlynor find themselves forced to veil or pray against their will.Instead, she describes the way they learn to realize piety:that they willingly and with determined effort transformtheir internal lives to enact given ideals. Rebecca Lester(2005) precisely charts the process through which postu-lants in a Mexican Catholic order slowly become confidentabout the presence of God in their lives. Charles Hirschkind(2006) gives an account of moral self-fashioning as Islamicsubjects deliberately craft their sensibilities, emotions, andwill through their engagement with cassette sermons. AnnaGade (2004) provides a careful, detailed account of the wayIndonesian Muslims set out to become pious through par-ticular techniques of reciting the Qur’an and the impact ofthose techniques on the their emotional experience. Theseethnographers draw our attention to how hard religiouspractitioners work, how they labor to develop specific skillsand ways of being, and how those skills deeply shape theirexperience of faith.

In this article, we work with a theory that learning toexperience God depends on interpretation (the socially taughtand culturally variable cognitive categories that identify thepresence of God), practice (the subjective and psycholog-ical consequences of the specific training specified by thereligion: e.g., prayer), and proclivity (a talent for and will-ingness to respond to practice). Interpretation and practiceare different kinds of learning, we suggest, and they canbe understood as skills because, as the learner learns, thelearner becomes more proficient, and there are noticeable,incremental differences between the novice and the expert.

This is a theory about the complexity of learning.It draws on existing scholarship in the anthropology ofreligion—and, in particular, on two strands of theory. Thefirst emphasizes the importance of the acquisition of cog-nitive and linguistic representations of God. Susan Harding(2000:60) recognizes that people do experience God in re-markable ways but is willing to say that language is not only atthe center of Christianity but also sufficient in itself to explainconversion. Webb Keane (2007) acknowledges that thereare intense spiritual experiences but focuses his analytic lenson the representation of interiority and its consequences.Vincent Crapanazano (2000) devotes his scholarly attentionin understanding Christianity to its language, and he acutelylinks commitments to linguistic literalism in both U.S. fun-damentalism and U.S. jurisprudence. Because of this, andbecause of the emergence of the interest in language ide-ology and in Christianity’s self-conscious use of language,much of the recent work on religion—by, among others,Jon Bialecki (2009), James Bielo (2009), Fenella Cannell(2006), Simon Coleman (2000), Matthew Engelke (2007),Joel Robbins (2001), and Bambi Schieffelin (2002)—hasfocused on language and linguistic representation in reli-gion and their consequences for the religious. We see thisapproach as arguing that religious actors must acquire cog-nitive and linguistic knowledge to interpret the presence ofGod.

68 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 1 • March 2010

The second strand emphasizes embodiment and sensorypractice, the impact of action and phenomenological expe-rience on the actor. Sherry Ortner (1984) famously char-acterized anthropology of the 1970s as a study of practice:the impact of what we do and say on a daily basis. ThomasCsordas, perhaps the leading contemporary spokespersonfor embodiment theory within contemporary psycholog-ical anthropology, emphasizes the ways in which peopleexperience abstract concepts physically through repeatedenactment. From this has emerged a field that could be vari-ously called “the anthropology of the senses” or—as Csordas(1993) has described it—of the “somatic mode of atten-tion” (see Geurts 2003; Howes 2005; Seremetakis 1996;Stoller 1989). Outside of anthropology, a growing body ofscholars has begun to look at the consequences of specificritual and prayer practices (e.g., Carruthers 1998). We takethis approach as arguing that religious actors must learn toexperience embodiment through particular cultural prac-tices. This learning, too, contributes to the way divinity isidentified and experienced.

Yet, although meaning must be learned, meaning is notlearned by all people in the same way. This article emergedfrom the ethnographic observation that not only did peoplediffer in their experience of the divine but also that thosedifferences were patterned and seemed to have something todo with a response to training. In the ethnography describedhere, people who reported that they heard God often werealso more likely to talk about vivid mental imagery andunusual sensory experience, and they sometimes attributedthose phenomena to prayer practice, as if they were the sideeffects of training. All congregants were invited by theirsocial world to learn to hear God speak, and because hearingGod was so important for them, most of them sought tolearn. They acquired the cognitive and linguistic patternsthat helped them to identify God’s presence. They alsolearned that there were specific practices they were meantto undertake, practices that were understood to enable themto hear God more effectively. But despite their practice, notall of them were able to hear God, or at least to hear Godas vividly as others. Some seemed to have what we couldcall a “proclivity” for the practices they are asked to learn.They were either more able to learn those skilled practicesor more interested in acquiring them, and those practicesseemed to change the way they experienced what they callspirituality.

We suggest that there is a skilled practice that is respon-sible for some (but not all) of those differences. I (TanyaLuhrmann, the first author) recognized that something likethis skill was involved as I did my ethnographic research.1 Thefirst part of the article describes the participant-observationthat led me to recognize that there were people who hada proclivity for some kind of skill and who developed thatskill into expertise. The second part of the article describesthe more quantitative and more psychological methods usedto specify the nature of this skill more precisely. To dothat second phase of the research, I called on colleagues

in other fields: a psychologist who helped me to shape thequestionnaires through which we evaluated the skill morecarefully (Howard Nussbaum) and the statistician who didthe statistical analysis of the results (Ronald Thisted). Themixed methods give us more confidence that there is a realphenomenon here worthy of further work. So this is ananthropological detective story: the ethnography suggestedthat there was a puzzle that had something to do with a kindof skill, and as ethnographer I turned to more psychologicalmethods to try to pin it down. We identify what we havefound as “absorption.” At the end, we turn to the questionof what we think absorption is and how it might relate tothe attempts to understand similar phenomenon describedby other anthropologists and in other fields.

THE ETHNOGRAPHIC PUZZLEThe ethnographic puzzle—the observation that people notonly experience God differently but also that those dif-ferences are patterned, as if there is a skill dimension in-volved in some spiritual practice—emerged from more orless traditional ethnographic fieldwork conducted by thefirst author in Chicago at an experientially oriented Chris-tian church: two years of Sunday morning services, a weeklyevening Bible-study housegroup, conferences, retreats, cof-fees, trips, and casual conversations. The church was a Vine-yard Christian Fellowship (there are eight in Chicago). Soci-ological data suggests that the Vineyard is representative ofthe major demographic shift in the religious practice of theUnited States since 1965, toward spiritualities more focusedon an intimate and present experience of God (e.g., Miller1997; Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2006). TheVineyard, now with over 600 churches nationwide, is anexample of a “new paradigm” evangelical Protestant church(Miller 1997; see also Bialecki 2009). Their members tendto be white and middle class, although not exclusively. Theircongregations are more likely to meet in gyms, not in actualchurch buildings, and like their surroundings they are infor-mal. They are more likely to have a rock band than a choir,and they use contemporary Christian music rather than tra-ditional hymns (although they may incorporate a hymn intothe service). They call themselves “Bible based,” by whichthey mean that the Bible is taken to be literally or nearliterally true, and they embrace an experiential spirituality.

In many ways these churches take the spiritual in-novations of Pentecostalism and render them acceptablefor white, mainstream, and middle-class congregations (cf.Robbins 2004; Wuthnow 1998). They are part of what theirhistorians describe as “third-wave” Christianity—the firstwave being Pentecostalism and the second being the CatholicCharismatic Revival (Jackson 1999; see Coleman 2000).Scholars attribute the emergence of this experiential Chris-tianity to the interest in spiritual experience that explodedin the 1960s with the Jesus People (or to use the pejorativephrase that captured the distress these groups generated inthe middle class, the “Jesus Freaks”; cf. Eskridge 2005). Asthe decades passed, the exuberance of this hippy Christianity

Luhrmann et al. • Absorption Hypothesis 69

settled into the more conventional and conservative culturalforms of new paradigm Protestantism (Shires 2007). Sundaymornings at these churches are relatively conventional. Peo-ple do not speak in tongues or fall, smitten by the Holy Spirit,during the service. Yet many speak in tongues when prayingalone, and these churches expect their congregants to ex-perience God directly, immediately, and concretely. It is acentral teaching in such churches that the direct experienceof God is the result of prayer.

Prayer is far more important in a new paradigm Protes-tant church than in a mainstream conventional Protestantchurch. At the Chicago Vineyard church, the pastor talkedrepeatedly about the importance of prayer and devoted en-tire Sunday morning teachings to explaining prayer. Therewere extra services during the week so that congregantscould get more time to pray. Each Sunday-morning servicebegan with 30 minutes of prayerful singing described by thechurch as “worship,” and every service ended in a call forpeople “who need prayer” to come up front to get prayer.Indeed, there was a “prayer team” chosen by and trainedwithin the church, and as the service drew to a close onesaw 20–30 people up at the front of the room, their handson each others’ shoulders, with those who were prayingspeaking aloud and those who were being prayed for stand-ing with tears running down their face. Congregants oftentalked about their prayer lives. When people prayed for eachother, they often wanted prayer to help their prayer lives toimprove.

Prayer was understood to enable the person who prayedto develop a relationship with God, and it was important notbecause it produced results (although it was understood thatit did, that God would respond to prayer in direct andconcrete ways) but because God wanted a relationship witheach human person. As the Purpose Driven Life, written bySaddleback pastor Rick Warren, put it: “God wants to beyour best friend” (Warren 2002:85). This relationship isunderstood to be like a relation between two persons. Thehuman person speaks to God, and God speaks back. Many,many books about prayer written for and read by evangelicalChristians emphasize the dialogic, interactive, human qualityof this relationship. In Hearing God, for instance, evangelicalintellectual Dallas Willard explains that God’s face-to-faceconversations with Moses are the “normal human life Godintended for us” (Willard 1999:18).

God was understood to speak back in several ways. Hespoke through the Bible. When congregants read scriptureand felt powerfully moved or affected by a particular pas-sage, they might infer that God spoke to them through thatpassage—that he led them to that particular page to havethem read and respond to it. One woman illustrates thiscultural model here:

I was reading in Judges and I don’t even know why I was readingit. There’s a part where God talks about raising up elders in thechurch to pray for the church. And I remember, it just stuck inmy head and I knew that the verse was really important and that

it was applicable to me. I didn’t know why. It was one of those,let me put it in my pocket and figure it out later.2

When asked how she knew that passage was important,the woman replied: “Because I just felt it. I just felt like itreally spoke to me. I don’t really know why. And a coupleof days later a friend asked me to be on the prayer team andit was like, wow, that’s what it was.” God was also under-stood to speak through circumstances. Congregants woulddescribe events that might seem to be coincidences—butthat they interpreted as God speaking to them to communi-cate that he loved them or wanted them to make a particulardecision. Here is a different congregant in a casual comment:

Everything in my life right now is focused on trying to get toEngland, and I needed to get some ID pictures. So I was reallyanxious—the money hasn’t really come together—and one after-noon I just felt like God said, you need to get up and go get those.Go get those ID pictures that you need. I was like, that’s totallyinefficient. I don’t have a car, so it’s like walking half an hour toWalgreens and another half an hour back. Like, I could do thislater and combine it with several things I need to get done. But Ifelt it was a step of faith to do this thing. So I did it—grumbling.Then on the way there and back I ran into three people I knew,and I felt that there was a kind of pattern, and that I was in theright place at the right time.

This model of interaction is found widely in many conserva-tive Christian churches (Ammerman 1987; Harding 2000).It is a model of interaction in which congregants learn tointerpret their everyday lives in particular ways. No one atthe Chicago Vineyard reported that he or she had difficultyhearing God “speak” thought scripture or through circum-stance.

However, congregants at the Vineyard also expectedto God to speak back to them by placing mental imagesor thoughts (sometimes called “impressions”) in their mindsor making their body feel a certain way. According to onecongregant:

I’m praying for someone and, you know, they describe theirsituation, what they want me to pray for. I start praying and starttrying to, you know, really experience God, and, you know, Isee these vivid images, and I’m explaining these vivid images andwhat I think they mean and, you know, sort of checking in withthe person, you know, does this resonate with you. They’re like“oh, my gosh, yes! How did you know that?”

Congregants expected to experience mental events, whichthey identified as not being their own but, rather, as belong-ing to an external presence—to God. This intensely partic-ipatory sense of God acting in one’s mind is not found in allconservative Christian churches and may be more particu-lar to experiential evangelical Christianity. It was also moredifficult for some congregants to experience themselves ashearing God in this way.

There were semiexplicit and socially shared expecta-tions within the community about what kind of mental eventscould qualify to be identified as God. When asked how theydistinguished the thoughts and images that came from Godfrom those that were their own, congregants usually listed

70 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 1 • March 2010

common “tests”: the thought or image was different fromwhat they had been thinking about; the thought or image wasin keeping with God’s character; the interpretation “this isGod” could be confirmed in some other way; and the ex-perience brought peace. Here is an example from someonewho explained that he decided to move to Chicago to jointhis particular Vineyard church:

I really just felt really clearly that God put [the Chicago] Vineyardinto my head. I didn’t know the church at all. I knew there was a[Chicago] Vineyard because I’d gone to Evanston around the timethe church was planning, but I didn’t know anything about it. Ididn’t spend any time in [Chicago]. I was like, this is really weird,but I couldn’t shake it. The rest of the service I just prayed over itand God just confirmed it. There was this total peace that wouldbe present when I would think about [Chicago] and the [Chicago]Vineyard. I can’t explain it any other way.

These tests, or expectations, were commonly describedas “discernment.” Discernment was an ambiguous, complexprocess. When a decision was consequential (e.g., was Godcalling the young couple to move to Los Angeles and awayfrom the man’s family?), it was not uncommon for con-gregants to spend many weeks praying about the decisionand asking other friends in the church to pray about thedecision and to talk to them about their prayer experience.Congregants gossiped about people who said that they werefollowing God’s voice but (gossipers thought) were reallyacting on their own wishes. Yet the expectations were clear.Even if hearing God in one’s mind was complicated, Godwas speaking and the congregant’s job was to hear.

Congregants explicitly understood this process of rec-ognizing God in their minds as a skill, which they needed tolearn by repeatedly carrying on inner-voice “conversations”with God during prayer and being attentive to the mentalevents that could count as God’s response. The many prayermanuals presumed that prayer was not an intuitive act but,rather, a skill that needed to be explicitly taught and delib-erately learned. As one states: “An essential part of livingthe with-God life is learning how we can communicate toGod. . . . But being aware of how God is supporting us andcommunicating too us is not always easy. We must trainourselves to listen for God and to respond to him” (Graybealand Roller 2006). Congregants also often said that when theywere learning to hear God speak in their minds—to distin-guish between their own thoughts and God’s thoughts—atfirst it was baffling. “When I was starting to be a Christian,”one man recalled, “people would be like, so what’s Godsaying to you? And I’m like, heck, I don’t know.”

Nevertheless, many said that they had learned to recog-nize God’s voice the way they recognized a person’s voiceon the phone. As one congregant explained, “It’s a differentsort of voice. I mean, I know my own voice. If I thought ofyour voice I would think of how your voice sounds, and if Ithink of my voice I think of how it sounds, even if I’m nothearing anything. It’s a different tone of voice.” Or, as an-other put it: “It’s like recognizing someone—it’s like, howdo you recognize your mom?” It was acknowledged in the

church that each person would experience God in their ownway and develop their own patterns of learning to recognizehim: some through warm tingling; others through goosebumps; others still through images or impressions or scrip-tural phrases. “I get a lot of images,” one person explained.Another said: “I rarely see images. When I pray for people Iget sensations that I can in turn translate into words. . . . Likemore than seeing the bird, you feel the flight of the bird.”Congregants were insistent that one could learn to identifyGod. “It gets to a point you just know it’s God’s voice. It’svery snappy and comes with constant prayer just non-stop.”

The ethnographic puzzle was that not everyone seemedto be able to do this equally well. At the Vineyard it wasacknowledged that some people were more “gifted” at prayerand at hearing God speak than others. This is an old idea inthe Christian tradition. In his first letter to the Corinthians,Paul points out that only some people are able to speak inthe language-like utterances identified as “tongues.” Othershave other gifts: healing, wisdom, or discernment (1 Cor12:8–11).

But it is one thing to speak of different “gifts” and an-other thing to speak of different “skills.” One might imaginethat gifts are really preferences: I could sing in the choir, butI prefer to bake for the church supper. Yet these congregantsdid not talk as if they preferred to do one rather than an-other. Some of them explicitly and repeatedly said that theydeeply desired to hear God speak to them in sensory ways,and they determinedly participated in what Lisa Capps andElinor Ochs (2002) describe as the “genre” of prayer practice(see also Shoaps 2002). Yet still they did not have those ex-periences in which God spoke to them through impressionsin their minds. They spoke regretfully about not having thepowerful spiritual experiences that other people had. Forexample, one man said:

I remember really desperately wanting to draw closer to God,having one of these inspired Holy Spirit moments that maybesometimes get more attention than they deserve . . . And I found,you know, [that] people experience God in very different ways.The way that I thought I would experience God wasn’t actuallythe way that I really grew in experiencing God. Mountain topexperiences, tangible signs and wonders. I wanted those and Isought those out but I never really found myself encounteringthem.

Another man commented a bit glumly: “I don’t have thesesuperpowerful experiences that make me fall to my knees.”And some people did not seem to want these experiencesat all, as this woman reports: “I don’t understand the gift ofprophecy completely. I probably never will and I don’t haveit and I don’t want it because it would scare me.”

Congregants do not actually lose social standing in thechurch through their failure to have these experiences, butthey are unable to become highly accomplished pray-ers,which does confer visibility and importance. The everydaydiscussions around prayer in the social world of the con-gregation are quite tolerant of those who fail to experiencethemselves as hearing from God in their minds, but those

Luhrmann et al. • Absorption Hypothesis 71

same discussions repeatedly hold up an experience of inti-macy with God as the most important relationship of one’slife, and they repeatedly represent that intimacy as hearingfrom God in one’s minds.

At the same time, congregants recognized that somepeople were experts in hearing God and, moreover, thatthose experts reported that they changed in more or lessthe same ways: they were able to focus more effectively,and their mental images became sharper. When members ofthe congregation spoke about prayer, they were very clearthat that prayer was a skill that had to be taught, that itwas hard, that not everyone was good at it, and that thosewho were naturally good and well trained would experiencechanges. Here is a reasonably good pray-er talking about thedevelopment of her skill:

What does God’s voice sound like? It takes practice. There weretimes when I just sat back and I was like, okay guys, I don’thear anything. . . . [Then] I felt like I was starting to hear fromhim more. A small voice sounds very vague but it’s such a gooddescription, kind of like the impression words make on a page. Irealized that I was going at it the way you would practice throwingthe ball, because I didn’t know what else to do . . . [Now] I feel itas well as—not hear it, but it feels like—it’s not a physical thingbut it feels like more than just in my head.

Here are another pray-er’s words:

It’s just like an infant learns how to put sentences together, andthen to have a conversation with someone and not just like betalking the whole time or just listening the whole time—to learnhow to speak and respond and listen, speak and listen and respond.Just to like be there and be focused. I’m seeing how peoplehave moved from praying where their mind would wander off tolearning to pray so that they can focus more and just pray. I’veseen this in my own life too.

There was even a name for the experts: they were called“prayer warriors.” As congregants who became prayer war-riors talk about how they changed, they reach for metaphorsfrom athletic games (throwing a ball) as if what they werelearning was more about doing than thinking.

This way of talking suggests that, in addition to learningto interpret, there was another kind of learning that changedsomething about the intensity of sensory experience. It isof course enormously complicated to speak of experientiallearning (Proudfoot 1985). Yet, it was striking that, amongthese congregants, each of those who became good pray-ersreported the same kinds of mental experiences, and those ex-periences were different from phenomena reported by thosewho were not good praye-rs. Good pray-ers repeatedly re-ported that their experiences of their senses had changed asthey had learned how to pray and had become engrossedwith prayer. This observation was not an explicit part ofthe shared cultural knowledge, although people sometimesmade comments about it. These changes did not seem tobe an ascribed part of a role but, rather, unintended conse-quences of the practice of prayer.

Good pray-ers commented that their sensory world be-came richer, more alive. Here are three people who describewhat changed for them as they learned how to pray:

Disciplining myself to pray. . . . It was like just opening it up,opening up your perceptions and tuning them up in a differentway so that even just walking down a street and looking at flowerstook on new significance.My senses are heightened when I’m feeling especially close to[God], when it’s like a joyful, a really joyful time.When that channel’s open, he’s more able to come. Sometimesit’ll just happen, like I’ll be walking down the street and I’ll seesomething that’s not really there. . . . Like I see it one moment,and it’s not there the next, so I know it wasn’t really there. Othertimes it’ll be almost see-through, but I can see it. That sort ofthing.

These pray-ers described shifts in their mental experience.They said that their mental images became sharper:

[Over time, as I have continued to pray], my images continue toget more complex and more distinct.I see images. I would say that I didn’t until I came to the Vineyard.

They also reported that they experienced more of whatwe will call “sensory overrides”: hallucination-like sensoryexperiences attributed to an external origin but with no ma-terial cause. At least, they reported that they experiencedsuch phenomena, and they often told the story of these ex-periences in ways that suggested that such phenomena beganto take place after they had become ardent pray-ers. Hereare quotations from ethnographic interviews with four dif-ferent people who were all pointed out to the ethnographeras “good pray-ers”:

Congregant 1: I was walking up the lake and down the lake and I waslike, should I go home now? And he [God] is like, “sit and listen.”Ethnographer: Did you hear that outside or head or inside your head?Congregant 1: That’s hard to tell, but in this instance it really felt likeit was outside.Ethnographer: How many times do you think you’ve heard his voiceoutside your head?Congregant 1: Two or three.! ! !Congregant 2: I remember praying for a job and I interviewed and Ididn’t know whether I was going to take it or not. Then when I wascleaning out my room, I heard a voice say, “that’s not the one.” Andthen I said, what? I looked around, and I’m like, maybe that’s someoneoutside. Then I realized: I clearly heard God say, “that’s not the one.” Ihave no doubt in my mind that it was God.! ! !Congregant 3: The Lord spoke to me clearly in April, like May orApril. To start a school.Ethnographer: You heard this audibly?Congregant 3: Yeah.Ethnographer: Were you alone?Congregant 3: Yeah, I was just praying. I wasn’t praying anything re-ally, just thinking about God, and I heard, “start a school.” I immediatelygot up and it was like, “Okay Lord, where?”! ! !

72 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 1 • March 2010

Congregant 4: I’ve been starting to see things that aren’t there and Iknow they’re not there and yet they’re not just in my mind. It’s likebeing able to see in a different realm. And that’s a part of the spiritualwarfare being able to be in a different realm. . . . Sometimes, it’s almostlike a heat wave, you know when you can see like the air moving butthere’s nothing else there.

Technically, such experiences are called “hallucinations.”It seemed that prayer experts spoke as if what they were

learning to do was to take their inner sensory world moreseriously, to treat their thoughts and images and sensations asmore meaningful, and to blur the line deliberately betweenwhat they might once have attributed to an internal cause andwhat they might now wish to attribute to an external one.That, after all is the point of experiential evangelical spiritual-ity: to experience God—an external presence—interactingwith one through phenomena one would ordinarily inter-pret as internal and often as simply distracting. It seemed asif these experts had learned to identify their own internalsensations as partaking in a spiritual realm that was exter-nal to them, even if it was not part of the material world.More striking, it seemed that, as these congregants lovinglyattended to their internal sensations, those sensations tookon a life of their own and became more and more vivid.This continued until the congregants occasionally experi-enced some of them as if they were located in the externalmaterial world—so that they saw and heard and smelled andfelt sensations not caused by material things.

QUANTITATIVE METHOD AND DATAIt was at this point that I (Tanya Luhrmann) became cu-rious about whether I could understand more about thisprocess, and I began to work with Howard Nusbaum andRonald Thisted. They advised me to interview people care-fully about the way they experienced God and to give themsome standard psychological scales to see if those scales mightpick out the differences between them.

I conducted detailed interviews with 28 congregants.I met most of them through a house group I had joinedand through repeated visits to the church. (This was not astrictly random sample; the aim was to compare phenomenawithin the group, rather than to estimate reliable rates ofphenomena for the church population.) Ten were male, 18female; 17 were white, seven African American, and fourAsian; 23 were between 20 and 30 years old and five wereover 30. The oldest was in her early fifties. This distributionwas representative of this predominantly young, somewhatdiverse congregation. All were asked the same questions.

We then went through every interview and pulled outquotations in which subjects reported that something hadchanged in the way they experienced their mind and theirsenses as they learned to pray. We organized those differ-ent descriptions into clusters of similar categories based onthe ethnographic knowledge of the congregation. They arethe categories congregants commonly used to describe theway congregants experienced God when they prayed. Eachcluster of categories then became a scale.

One of these scales was about “focus.” We listed thedifferent ways people had commonly described being caughtup in prayer and phrased each one as a yes or no question:

Did he/she describe a sense of being absorbed or experiencing “flow”when praying?Did he/she report that he/she experienced surroundings to changesubjectively (e.g., “in my mind I’d go to that place”)?Did he/she report that time seemed to change when he/she prayed?Did he/she describe experience while praying as being a conduit forGod (“I feel like almost like a tube the Holy Spirit is feeding throughme”)?Did he/she say anything about “switching” while praying?Did he/she describe learning to gain increased focus in prayer?Did he/she specifically say that God flowed through him/her?

We then created a “sensory” subscale around the ways inwhich different people had described experiencing the spir-itual world with their senses:

Did he/she specifically say that he/she described God with the senses?Did he/she say that he/she commonly got images in prayer?Did he/she say that he/she commonly got sensations/thoughts inprayer?Did he/she specifically say something about the vividness of thoseexperiences (e.g., “it’s almost like a powerpoint presentation”)?Did he/she describe unusually intense visions or voices that he/sheexperienced in his/her mind but felt was almost external?Did he/she report smells from something not materially present?Did he/she report having a physical sensation of being touched by God(e.g., saying yes when asked, did you feel it on your skin)?Did he/she report auditory or visual experience of something notmaterially present between sleep and awareness (hypnagogic or hyp-napompic sensory phenomena)?Did he/she report auditory or visual experience of something notmaterially present while fully awake?Did he/she spontaneously remark that he/she “loves the Holy Spiritside of God” or similar formulation?3

We created a “vividness” subscale to capture whether con-gregants did, in fact, experience God in the vivid ways thatthe teachings and books of the church suggested that oneshould:

Did he/she say that he/she prayed pray to God about things that mightseem trivial to other people, like getting a haircut?Did he/she say that he/she spoke freely to God throughout the day?Did he/she say that he/she would describe God as his/her best friendor like an imaginary friend (except real)?Did he/she say that he/she ever gets angry with God for personalexperiences (e.g., for not getting into the college of one’s choice)?Did he/she say that he/she had a playful, teasing side to the relationshipwith God?Did prayer seem to be experienced as genuinely dialogic?

Then we went back through each interview and scored itaccording to these scales. If we could mark “yes” for thequestion based on the interview, the person got one point

Luhrmann et al. • Absorption Hypothesis 73

on the scale. The score for the scale was the sum of thepoints.

We counted up the points, and then we looked at therelationship between the scales and the questionnaire thatwe had settled on after piloting a few different scales. Thiswas the Tellegen Absorption Scale (Tellegen and Atkinson1974). It has 34 items that one marks as “true” or “false.” Asubject get a point for every “true.” The scale does not mea-sure religiosity; it has only one item that could be construedas religious. The questions tap subjects’ willingness to becaught up in their imaginative experience and in nature andmusic. It has items like these: “If I wish, I can imagine (ordaydream) some things so vividly that they hold my attentionas a good movie or story does” or “when I listen to music Ican get so caught up in it that I don’t notice anything else.”

A subject’s Tellegen score was not related to the lengthof time he or she prayed on a daily basis (see Figure 1): thatis, the scale is not a measure of practice. Yet the Tellegenscore was significantly related to the focus subscale (r =.54; p <.01) and the sensory subscale (r = . 56; p <.01;see Figure 2). Most remarkably, the vividness subscale washighly correlated with the Tellegen (r = . 66; p <.01; seeFigure 3). The vividness subscale should seem on the surfacebe a measure of theological belief because it asks not aboutsensory experience but about characteristics of the subject’sunderstanding of God. Yet those who had high Tellegenscores were much more likely to report experiencing Godas if God really is a person—someone they could talk toeasily, who talked back, with whom one could laugh, atwhom one could get angry. And if one held Tellegen scoreconstant, the time spent in prayer was in fact significantlycorrelated to the vividness of the God experience (r = . 52;p <.01).

The Tellegen Absorption Scale also was significantly re-lated to which congregants reported sensory overrides, orhallucination-like phenomena. If a congregant answered pos-itively to half the items on the scale, the chance of reportinga sensory experience while fully awake that was attributed

FIGURE 1. Amount of time spent praying plotted against subject’s Tel-legen score.

FIGURE 2. Subject’s sensory scale score plotted against subject’s Tellegenscore.

to an external source not materially present (like hearingGod say “I will always be with you” from the back seat ofa car) was six times as high as for those who said “true” toless than half the items (calculated by odds ratio). Slightlyover a third of the subjects reported externally attributedexperiences (hearing with their ears, seeing outside of theirhead) of sensory experiences of something not materiallypresent.

Moreover, people who did not experience God in thevivid way the Vineyard thought they should also did notthink that the Tellegen scale described them. The man whohad wanted and expected a mountaintop experience butdid not have one marked “true” for only four of the items.The man who glumly said he had not had these powerfulexperiences (and who later asked our housegroup to prayfor him that he would hear God speak “with a boomingvoice”) marked “true” for only five. He even wrote next toone item: “There are such people?” The woman who saidshe’d be afraid of prophecy marked “true” only next to 13.By contrast, the woman who was clearly regarded as the best

FIGURE 3. Subject’s vividness scale score plotted against subject’s Tel-legen score.

74 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 1 • March 2010

and most effective pray-er, someone who was held up as anexample of a prayer warrior, marked “true” for 33 of the34 items. When she finishing writing on the questionnairethat afternoon in the ethnographer’s office, she looked upand said, “The man who created this scale lived inside myhead.”

DISCUSSIONThe skeptic might look at these results and conclude that theTellegen Absorption Scale simply overlaps with the Vine-yard model of the experience of God. Yet the scale onlycontains one item that could be described as religious: “Ithink I really know what some people mean when they talkabout mystical experiences.” Only one other item asks aboutan alternate state and the state is not identified as religious:“I sometimes “step outside” my usual self and experience anentirely different state of being.” The Tellegen scale is copy-right protected and so cannot be reproduced in its entirely,but it is easily available online. Previously published itemsapart from the four already cited are:

I can be deeply moved by a sunset.I like to watch cloud shapes change in the sky.When listening to organ music or other powerful music I some-times feel as if I am being lifted into the air.The sound of a voice can be so fascinating to me that I can just goon listening to it.Sometimes I feel and experience things as I did as a child.I can sometimes recollect certain past experiences in my life withsuch clarity and vividness that it is like living them again or almostso.At times I somehow feel the presence of someone who is notphysically there.If I wish, I can imagine that my body is so heavy that I could notmove it if I wanted to.Sometimes I can change noise into music by the way I listen to it.My thoughts often don’t occur as words but as visual images.Sometimes thoughts and images come to me without the slightesteffort on my part.Different colors have distinctive and special meanings for me.I find that different odors have different colors. [Tellegen1981:220–221]

Rather than capturing the achievement of a particularstate, the scale seems to capture a talent for and willingness (aproclivity) to be absorbed. That does overlap with what theVineyard asks of its congregants, but it overlaps in an interest-ing way that reveals something about Vineyard prayer. Thekind of prayer taught by the Vineyard—and arguably, by allexperiential evangelical churches (Miller 1997)—demandsthe use of one’s imagination. It is, to use a technical term,kataphatic prayer, of which the exemplary form is the Igna-tian spiritual exercises. Such prayer asks one to be presentin a scene one imagines as if one were there. The Tellegenscale seems to capture someone’s willingness to imagine,and the results of this work are a sobering reminder that thepastor’s invitation to imagine God’s presence by one’s sideand talking back in one’s mind reaches more powerfully tothose who are most comfortable with imagination in the firstplace. The questionnaire seems to identify someone’s will-

ingness to allow him- or herself to be absorbed in internal orexternal sensory experience for its own sake—to enjoy theinvolvement in itself rather than experiencing it primarilyas a means to some other goal. And that is what kataphaticprayer asks of someone: to focus inwardly with absorbedattention on internal sensory experience.

The most surprising result of the work reported hereis the significant relationship between the Tellegen Absorp-tion Scale and sensory override, which suggests that ab-sorbed attention to internal sensory experience may generatesensory overrides. The scale does not ask about hallucina-tions, but those who say yes to more than 18 of its itemsare far more likely to report hallucination-like phenom-ena. This relationship is important because there is new,increasingly prominent research in psychiatry, which de-scribes hallucination-like experiences as risk factors for psy-chosis. There is mounting evidence that hallucination-likephenomena are widespread in the general population. TheNational Institute of Health Epidemiologic Catchment AreaProgram study found that roughly 13 percent of the pop-ulation reported at least one hallucination when not underthe influence of drugs or alcohol (Tien 1991; cf. Sidgewicket al. 1894; West 1948). Similar or much higher rates haverecently been found in other work (Horwood et al. 2008;Ohayon et al. 1996; for bereavement, see Grimby 1993).There is an active movement by European psychiatrists andpsychologists (Bentall 2003; Claridge 1997; Johns and vanOs 2001; Romme and Escher 1989) who take these dataas evidence that psychotic symptoms are widely distributedin society. They are motivated by the laudable desire to de-stigmatize serious mental illness, but the claim has the unfor-tunate consequence of suggesting, in time-honored fashion,that spiritual experience is akin to psychiatric illness.4

The combination of ethnographic and empirical work re-ported here provides evidence for another explanation: thatwhen people believe that God will speak to them throughtheir senses, when they have a proclivity for absorption,and when they are trained in absorption by the practice ofprayer, these people will report internal sensory experienceswith sharper mental-imagery and more sensory overrides(see also Noll 1985 for a related argument that shamanisminvolves mental-imagery training). That alternative expla-nation would travel through the domain of hypnosis and dis-sociation (cf. Bourguignon 1976; Seligman 2005; Seligmanand Kirmayer 2008; Taves 2009). Tellegen first set out todevelop the scale as a pen-and-paper measure of hypnoticsusceptibility. In the end, the scale correlated only modestlywith the current gold standard measure of hypnotic suscepti-bility, the Stanford C (Nadon et al. 1991; Whalen and Nash1996). Yet the Dissociative Experiences Scale, probably themost widely used measure of dissociation, bases a third ofits items on absorption. (Another third measures amnesiaand the final third measures depersonalization.) The leadingscholars of hypnosis suggest that hypnosis can be under-stood as one third absorption, one third suggestion, and onethird dissociation (Spiegel and Spiegel 2004); those scholars

Luhrmann et al. • Absorption Hypothesis 75

assume that the psychological dimension of trance is a hyp-notic or autohypnotic state. The psychologists who workon absorption do not talk about training effects. Tellegenseems to have thought of absorption as a personality traitrather than a skill. Yet clinicians who work with hypnosisand dissociation are clear that some kind of practice effectscan be seen (Spiegel and Spiegel 2004).

We believe that “absorption” is best understood as themental capacity common to trance, hypnosis, dissociation,and much other spiritual experience in which the individualbecomes caught up in ideas or images or fascinations (seealso Butler 2006; Roche and McConkey 1990). From thisperspective, “absorption” is the name of the capacity to be-come focused on the mind’s object—what humans imagineor see around them—and to allow that focus to increasewhile diminishing attention to the myriad of everyday dis-tractions that accompany the management of normal life.Just as humans can be more or less focused on an object,the degree of absorption can vary among individuals and forany individual at different times. Absorption is a continuumalong which all can travel (and culture can encourage or dis-courage such travel). Most of us experience light absorptionwhen we settle into a book and let the story carry us away.But some of us get so absorbed that we startle when someoneenters the room, because we did not pay attention to thesoft tread of the person’s feet as he or she approached. Someget so absorbed that the characters of an engrossing novelbecome almost real, so that Frodo’s journey lingers on inour imagination after we close the book, seemingly moreimportant than our schoolwork or our jobs.

There are no specific physiological markers of trance orhypnosis or dissociation, but as those absorbed states growsdeeper, the person becomes more difficult to distract, andhis sense of time and agency begins to shift. Those who be-come more absorbed live more within their imaginations andtheir inner worlds, and they begin to feel that the events intheir daydreams happen to them and feel more real, that theyare bystanders to their own awareness, just as one is when adaydream is so compelling that one lets it unfold to see whathappens rather than knowing that the dreamer commands thetale. And we believe that, as the absorption grows deeper,people often experience more imagery and more sensoryphenomena, sometimes with hallucinatory vividness.

Talent for and training in absorption may be impor-tant in other religious practices reported in the ethnographiccorpus, particularly in those practices described as trance.Rebecca Seligman and Laurence Kirmayer (2008) remind usthat to say that a psychological capacity is involved with areligious or psychiatric phenomenon does not fully explainthat phenomenon. But doing so allows us to understand theimpact of sociocultural practice more deeply and, in turn,the nature of the psychological capacity more completely.And certainly the ethnographic work on shamanism, posses-sion, glossolalia, and charismatic Christian healing suggeststhat practice makes a difference to the subjective experi-ence of trance and that some people respond to this practice

more than others. Among the Bororo, only some of thosewho could become shamans do in fact embrace the role. Todo so, they must have certain kinds of intense daydreamsand sensory experiences, and after illustrating their capacityfor those experiences, they must be trained to enter intothat spiritual domain through their minds again and at will(Crocker 1985). In Mayotte, only some become possessed;when possessed, they dissociate; and after their first disso-ciation, they must be trained. As Michael Lambek explains,“the entry into trance, just as much as subsequent behav-ior, must be learned, and this process takes more or lesstime in different individuals” (1981:55). Those who speak intongues often experience themselves as in a dissociated statein which the speaking is involuntary, but in fact their glosso-lalia displays learning (Samarin 1972). Only some of thosewho become charismatic Catholics become known as ex-perts in the group; they often have an apprenticeship in theircraft; mental imagery is central and cultivated. “If there isany sense in which revelation might be said to be perceptioninstead of imagination” begins a discussion by an anthropolo-gist (Csordas 1994:108). It may be that of the many skills inwhich these different practitioners are trained, one of themis absorption.

Religion and spirituality are enormously complex hu-man phenomena. Here we suggest that we may be able toidentify one kind of skill that can be cultivated, for whichsome may have more of a proclivity or talent than others.Absorption does not explain religion and far less does itexplain it away. But to understand that some people mayhave developed their talent more than others may help usto understand why some people become gifted practitionersof their faith and others with the intention and desire to doso struggle and do not. And it reminds us, as Maurice Bloch(2008) remarks, that at the heart of the religious impulselies the capacity to imagine a world beyond the one we havebefore us.

T. M. Luhrmann Department of Anthropology, Stanford University,Stanford, CA 94305; luhrmann@stanford.eduHoward Nusbaum Department of Psychology, University ofChicago, Chicago, IL 60637; h-nusbaum@uchicago.eduRonald Thisted Departments of Health Studies and Statistics, Uni-versity of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637; r-thisted@uchicago.edu

NOTESAcknowledgments. I am very grateful to the many conversationsI have had over the years with people too numerous to name about ab-sorption, psychological anthropology and mixed methods, and otherrelevant topics. My deepest thanks go to the University of ChicagoTempleton Network, under the leadership of John Cacioppo, whichreally encouraged me to see if I could get quantitative evidence formy ethnographic observations. I presented this material to them inits earliest stages, and they graciously listened and commented as thework developed. It was through this network that I met Howard

76 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 1 • March 2010

Nusbaum and Ronald Thisted and began to work with them. Thework has benefited from presentations to many different audiencesand, as always, from conversations with Richard Saller and GeorgeLuhrmann.

1. The pronoun I will always refer to Tanya Luhrmann, the prin-ciple author of the work; we refers to the three authors as ateam.

2. All quotations are from formal (recorded) and informal inter-views conducted in Chicago between 2004 and 2006.

3. In asking about hallucinations, as with the penultimate list item,we used the criteria psychiatrists use to distinguish betweenphenomena that people experience as occurring inside the mindor outside the mind: Did you hear it inside the head or outside?With your ears? Before your face or inside your head? And soforth.

4. This is a complicated issue. It may be that people reporthallucination-like phenomena for many reasons, some of whichare, in fact, indicators of risk for psychotic distress. If so,such phenomena would be, as a class, risk factors for illness,even though most hallucinations would have no pathologicalimplications.

REFERENCES CITEDAmmerman, Nancy Tatom

1987 Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World.New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University.

Asad, Talal2003 Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity.

Stanford: University of Stanford.Atran, Scott

2002 In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion.New York: Oxford.

2007 Religion’s Social and Cultural Landscape: An EvolutionaryPerspective. In Handbook of Cultural Psychology. ShinobuKitayama and Dov Cohen, eds. Pp. 417–453. New York:Guilford.

Augustine1963 The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Rex Warner,

trans. New York: New American Library.Barrett, Justin L.

2004 Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Walnut Creek, CA:AltaMira.

Bentall, Richard P.2003 Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature. London:

Penguin.Bialecki, Jon

2009 Disjuncture, Continental Philosophy’s New “Political Paul,”and the Question of Progressive Christianity in a SouthernCalifornian Third Wave Church. American Ethnologist 36(1):110–123.

Bielo, James S.2009 Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical

Group Bible Study. New York: New York University.Bloch, Maurice

2008 Why Religion Is Nothing Special but Is Central. Philosoph-ical Transactions of the Royal Society 365:2055–2061.

Bourguignon, Erika1976 Possession. San Francisco: Chandler and Sharp.

Boyer, Pascal2001 Religion Explained. New York: Basic.

Butler, Lisa D.2006 Normative Dissociation. Psychiatric Clinics of North Amer-

ica 29:45–62.Cannell, Fenella, ed.

2006 The Anthropology of Christianity. Chapel Hill, NC: DukeUniversity Press.

Capps, Lisa, and Eleanor Ochs2002 Cultivating Prayer. In The Language of Turn and Sequence.

Cecilia Ford, Barbara Fox, and Sandra Thompson, eds. Pp. 39–55. New York: Oxford.

Carruthers, Mary1998 The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making

of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge: University of Cambridge.Claridge, Gordon, ed.

1997 Schizotypy: Implications for Illness and Health. Oxford:Oxford University.

Coleman, Simon2000 The Globalization of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading

the Gospel of Prosperity. Cambridge: Cambridge University.Crapanzano, Vincent

2000 Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit tothe Bench. New York: New Press.

Crocker, Jon Christopher1985 Vital Souls: Bororo Cosmology, Natural Symbolism, and

Shamanism. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Csordas, Thomas J.

1993 The Somatic Modes of Attention. Cultural Anthropology8(2):135–156.

1994 The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of CharismaticHealing. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Engelke, Matthew2007 A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African

Church. Berkeley: University of California Press.Eskridge, Larry

2005 God’s Forever Family. Ph.D. dissertation, Department ofHistory, Stirling University.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E.1956 Nuer Religion. Oxford: Oxford University.

Fodor, Jerry A.1983 The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gade, Anna M.2004 Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the

Recited Qur’an in Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘iPress.

Geurts, Kathryn Linn2003 Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an

African Community. Berkeley: University of California.Graybeal, Lynda L., and Julia L. Roller

2006 Connecting with God: A Spiritual Formation Guide.New York: HarperCollins.

Grimby, A.1993 Bereavement among Elderly People: Grief Reactions,

Luhrmann et al. • Absorption Hypothesis 77

Post-Bereavement Hallucinations and Quality of Life. ActaPsychiatrica Scandinavica 87:72–80.

Guthrie, Stewart Elliott1995 Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. Oxford:

Oxford University.Harding, Susan Friend

2000 The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language andPolitics. Princeton: Princeton University.

Herzfeld, Micheal2003 The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global

Hierarchy of Value. Chicago: University of Chicago.Hirschkind, Charles

2006 The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Is-lamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.

Horwood, Jeremy, Giovani Salvi, Kate Thomas, Larisa Duffy,David Gunnell, Chris Hollis, Glyn Lewis, Paulo Menezes,Andrew Thompson, Dieter Wolke, Stanley Zammit, andGlynn Harrison

2008 IQ and Non-Clinical Psychotic Symptoms in 12-Year-Olds:Results from the ALSPAC Birth Cohort. British Journal ofPsychiatry 193:185–191.

Howes, David, ed.2005 Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford:

Berg.Jackson, Bill

1999 The Quest for the Radical Middle: A History of the Vineyard.Cape Town: Vineyard International.

Johns, Louise C., and Jin van Os2001 The Continuity of Psychotic Experiences in the General

Population. Clinical Psychology Review 21(8):1125–1141.Kahneman, Daniel

2003 A Perspective on Judgment and Choice: Mapping BoundedRationality. American Psychologist 58(9):697–720.

Keane, Webb2007 Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission En-

counter. Berkeley: University of California.Kulick, Don

1992 Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socializa-tion, Self, and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinea Village.Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Lambek, Michael1981 Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte.

Cambridge: Cambridge University.Lester, Rebecca J.

2005 Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a MexicanConvent. Berkeley: University of California.

Mahmood, Saba2005 Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Sub-

ject. Princeton: Princeton University.Miller, Donald E.

1997 Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in theNew Millennium. Berkeley: University of California.

Nadon, Robert, Irene P. Hoyt, Patricia A. Register, and John F.Kihlstrom

1991 Absorption and Hypnotizability: Context Effects Reexam-ined. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60(1):144–153.

Noll, Richard1985 Mental Imagery Cultivation as a Cultural Phenomenon, with

Commentary. Current Anthropology 26(4):443–461.Ohayon, Maurice M., Robert G. Priest, Malljai Caulet, and Chris-

tian Guilleminault1996 Hynagogic and Hynapompic Hallucinations: Pathological

Phenomena? British Journal of Psychiatry 169(4):459–467.Ortner, Sherry B.

1984 Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties. ComparativeStudies in Society and History 26(1):126–166.

Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life2006 Spirit and Power: Ten Nation Survey. Washington, DC:

Pew Charitable Trust.Proudfoot, Wayne

1985 Religious Experience. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Robbins, Joel2001 God Is Nothing but Talk: Modernity, Language, and Prayer

in a Papua New Guinea Society. American Anthropologist103(4):901–912.

2004 The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christian-ity. Annual Reviews in Anthropology 33:117–143.

Roche, Suzanne M., and Kevin M. McConkey1990 Absorption: Nature, Assessment, Correlates. Journal of

Personality and Social Psychology 59(1):91–101.Romme, Marius A. J., and Alexandre D. M. A. C. Escher

1989 Hearing Voices. Schizophrenia Bulletin 15(2):209–216.Samarin, William J.

1972 Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language ofPentecostalism. New York: McMillan.

Schieffelin, Bambi B.1990 The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization

of Kaluli Children. Cambridge: Cambridge University.2002 Marking Time: The Dichotomizing Discourse of Multiple

Temporalities. Current Anthropology 43(4):5–17.Seligman, Rebecca

2005 Distress, Dissociation, and Embodied Experience: Recon-sidering the Pathways to Mediumship and Mental Health. Ethos33(1):71–99.

Seligman, Rebecca, and Laurence J. Kirmayer2008 Dissociative Experience and Cultural Neuroscience: Narra-

tive, Metaphor, and Mechanism. Culture, Medicine and Psy-chiatry 32(1):31–64.

Seremetakis, C. Nadia, ed.1996 The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture

in Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago.Shires, Preston

2007 Hippies of the Religious Right. Houston: Baylor.Shoaps, Robin A.

2002 “Pray Earnestly”: The Textual Construction of Personal In-volvement in Pentecostal Prayer and Song. Journal of LinguisticAnthropology 12(1):34–71.

78 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 1 • March 2010

Sidgwick, Henry, Alice Johnson, Frederic W. H. Myers, FrankPodmore, and Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick

1894 Report on the Census of Hallucinations. Proceedings of theSociety for Psychical Research 10(26):25–394.

Sperber, Dan1996 Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Wi-

ley Blackwell.Spiegel, Herbert, and David Spiegel

2004[1978] Trance and Treatment: Clinical Uses of Hypnosis.Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.

Stoller, Paul1989 The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthro-

pology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Taves, Ann

2009 Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Ap-proach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things.Princeton: Princeton University.

Taylor, Charles2007 A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Tellegen, Auke1981 Practicing the Two Disciplines for Relaxation and Enlight-

enment: Comment on “Role of the Feedback Signal in Elec-tromyograph Biofeedback: The Relevance of Attention.” Jour-nal of Experimental Psychology 110(2):217–226.

Tellegen, Auke, and Gilbert Atkinson1974 Openness to Absorption and Self-Altering Experiences

(“Absorption”), a Trait Related to Hypnotic Susceptibility.Journal of Abnormal Psychology 83(3):268–277.

Tien, A. Y.1991 Distribution of Hallucinations in the Population. Social Psy-

chiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 26:287–292.Warren, Rick

2002 The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

West, D. J.1948 A Mass-Observation Questionnaire on Hallucinations. Jour-

nal of the Society for Psychical Research 34(644–645):187–195.

Whalen, Jonathan E., and Michael R. Nash1996 Hypnosis and Dissociation: Theoretical, Empirical, and

Clinical Perspectives. In Handbook of Dissociation. Larry K.Michelson and William J. Ray, eds. Pp. 191–206. New York:Plenum.

Whitehouse, Harvey2004 Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious

Transmission. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.Willard, Dallas

1999 Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationshipwith God. Downer’s Grove, IL: Intervarsity.

Wuthnow, Robert1998 After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

FOR FURTHER READING(These selections were made by the American Anthropologist editorialinterns as examples of research related in some way to this article. They donot necessarily reflect the views of the authors.)

Corr, Rachel2004 To Throw the Blessing: Poetics, Prayer, and Performance

in the Andes. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean An-thropology 9(2):382–408.

Engelke, Matthew2004 Text and Performance in an African Church: The Book,

“Live and Direct.” American Ethnologist 31(1):76–91.MacDonald, Jeffery L.

2002 Embodying the Spirits among the Iu-Mien. Anthropologyof Consciousness 13(1):60–67.

Mahmood, Saba2001 Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Rit-

ual: Disciplines of S. alat. American Ethnologist 28(4):827–853.

Miyazaki, Hirokazu2000 Faith and Its Fulfillment: Agency, Exchange, and the Fijian

Aesthetics of Completion. American Ethnologist 27(1):31–51.

Simon, Gregory2009 The Soul Freed of Cares? Islamic Prayer, Subjectivity, and

the Contradictions of Moral Selfhood in Minangkabau, Indone-sia. American Ethnologist 36(2):258–275.